ITC Garamond™

Considered by many to be one of the finest commercial font designs of all time, the Garamond® font family is really more of an overarching “supergroup” of families that includes iterations such as the Apple Garamond™ family, the ITC Garamond® family and the Garamond 3™ family. It is an old-style serif garalde font, which were typically designed during the 16th and 17th centuries, most often in France and Italy.

The Garamond font family owes its name to a bit of historical confusion. Claude Garamond, a famed type designer of the 16th century, did indeed design a typeface with several attributes similar to the modern Garamond, and on which some of the modern Garamonds have been based; however, the majority of contemporary iterations are actually based on a typeface developed by Jean Jannon 60 years after Garamond’s death.

Jannon’s typeface was inspired by Garamond’s original, but had stylistic differences in terms of slope and axis, and was characterized by more asymmetry than Garamond’s design. When France’s National Printing Office reissued Jannon’s work in 1825, they incorrectly attributed it to Garamond. It was not until the middle of the 20th century that scholarly work uncovered the true designer behind the “Garamond” font family.

The 20th century brought several redesigns of the Garamond typeface, including Thomas Maitland Cleland and Morris Fuller Benton’s Garamond 3, which was a repurposing based on Jannon’s work. Digital versions the Adobe Garamond® font family and the Stempel Garamond™ font family were based on Garamond’s work, while the ITC Garamond and Apple Garamond typefaces are considered new designs.

Jannon’s Garamond typeface is distinguished by its unusually shallow “a” bowl and a marked contrast in the strength of its downstrokes and upstrokes. It is considered to be an environmentally friendly font due to the fact that it uses less ink than comparable commercial fonts in printing.

The Garamond design is prominent in many aspects of publishing and media. It has been used in some of the most famous books of all time, including the Dr. Seuss books and the U.S. editions of the Harry Potter series.

Dave Eggers employed it for his popular literary quarterly, McSweeney’s. Many consider the Garamond design to be amongst the most legible typefaces for a print medium.

Licenses for desktop fonts

A typical desktop font EULA will allow you to install the font on your computer for use with authoring tools including word processors, design tools and other applications that permit font selection. Fonts can also be used for creation of print documents, static images (JPEG, TIFF, PNG) and logos. The cost of a desktop font license is determined by the number of workstations on which the font is to be used.

Licenses for Fonts.com Web Fonts subscriptions

The Fonts.com Web Fonts license provides access to a selection of fonts for use on websites for use with CSS@font-face. Font delivery from our global network is available through all subscriptions – even our free plan. Some plans include the option to self-host, access to desktop fonts, and use of our FontExplorer X font manager and Typecast design application. The price of a plan is determined by its pageview allowance and other features included.

Licenses for mobile apps

A mobile app license permits the embedding of the font into the iOS, Android or Windows RT mobile platforms. Licenses are platform-specific meaning a separate license is required for each platform the font is embedded into. Licenses remain valid for the total operating life of the app and a new license is not required to cover free updates to the app.

Licenses for electronic publications (eBooks)

An electronic publication license can be used for the embedding of fonts into electronic documents including e-books, e-magazines and e-newspapers. A license covers only a single title but is valid for the full operating life of that title. Every issue of an e-magazine, e-newspaper or other form of e-periodical is considered a separate, new publication. Format variations do not count as separate publications. If a publication is updated and distributed to existing users, a new license is not required. However, updated versions issued to new customers are defined as new publications and require a separate license.

Server licenses

Server licenses authorize the installation of a font on a server that is accessed by remote users or website visitors. These licenses are commonly used by Web-based businesses providing goods that are personalized by its users such as business cards, images with captions and personalized merchandise. Users are not allowed to download the font file and the font may not be used outside the server environment. The font may not be employed for a software as a service (SaaS) application in which the service is the actual product and not the means of providing the product.
Server licenses cover a set number of CPU cores on production servers (development servers are not counted) on which the font is installed. The license is valid for 1 year.